Widespread corruption plagued Tripura under the Left government led by Manik Sarkar, who is otherwise known for his clean image.
March 3, 2018, will be a red-letter day in the history of what used to be a red bastion of the Northeast – Tripura. For, this is the day when the more than two-decade-old Left rule comes to an end after a catastrophic battle between two opposing ideologies – communism and religious nationalism (Hindutva). This is the day when the rusted hammer and sickle are consigned to the dustbin of history. Good or bad, this is the reality that the CPM will have to learn to come to terms with.
What went wrong then? The Left in Tripura has failed to feel the pulse of the people, a symptom of a greater malaise that has afflicted the India’s communist parties for the past many decades.
It was by sheer luck that CPM had been able to cast a ‘magic spell’ over the people of this northeastern state thanks to a near-absent opposition all these years. It is true that Tripura has flourished on key social indicators such as literacy and sex ratio – with 87.8 per cent literacy rate. Tripura is the fifth-most literate state in India, according to the 2011 Census. Also, at 960 females per 1,000 males, the state’s sex ratio is above the national average of 942. However, poverty and unemployment have proved to be a major hindrance to its development.
According to the state’s Economic Survey 2015-16, Tripura is plagued by “high rate of poverty, low per-capita income, low capital formation, inadequate infrastructural facilities, geographical isolation, communication bottleneck, inadequate exploitation, inadequate use of forest and mineral resources, low progress in industrial field and high unemployment”.
When it comes to per capita income, Tripura recorded Rs 71,666 per person in 2014-15, far below the national average of Rs 86,454, according to the Economic Survey 2017-18. Even on the job front, the state has the highest unemployment percentage in India – 19.7 per cent as against the national average of 4.9 per cent.
As if that were not enough, widespread corruption has plagued the state under the government led by Manik Sarkar, who is otherwise known for his clean image. During his election campaign in Tripura, BJP chief Amit Shah accused a number of state ministers of involvement in chit fund scams. The central government had also told the Supreme Court that there were irregularities in the implementation of MNREGA scheme.
Needless to say, the CPM failed to read the writing on the wall and dug its own grave. Its biggest blunder was its failure to meet the aspirations of the youth. ThePrint had reported how Tripura’s young voters, born and raised under the Left rule, were despairing. In India today, any party that disregards the youth is bound to be doomed. The Indian Left appears to be ignoring this reality – it is still being guided by an obsolete ideology of class struggle of the ‘oppressed’ against the ‘oppressor’. It has failed to realise that the oppressed in India do not just include the so-called working class and the poor, but also the most influential middle class and the youth.
The truth is the Left has failed to comprehend the complexities of the Northeast, a multi-ethnic region that is culturally different from the mainland India. The issue of separatism fuelled by sub-nationalist aspirations and identity politics has to be understood from a historical point of view. This is, however, the general problem with all major political parties, which tend to feel that the Northeast has a homogenous culture and every state has the same problem. It’s true that the lack of development is common to all seven states (excluding Sikkim), but each state has its own set of distinct problems.
The obvious question then is this: how did the CPM manage to rule Tripura for so many years? The answer is simple: Tripura, with its large Bengali population, did not pose any major challenge to CPM politically. The Left found it too easy to handle the state because it managed to crush the opposition by trick or threat. What it did not realise was that its politics was getting limited to satisfying the needs of daily wage labourers and not the rising middle class and the youth. At the same time, the revival of the tribal movement for a separate Twipraland, which the CPM was able to keep under check for some time, proved to be a big spoiler. The BJP exploited this opportunity while the Left was left in the lurch.